


pomegranates

by AellaIrene



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-09 02:21:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11094885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AellaIrene/pseuds/AellaIrene
Summary: Persephone in the underworld.Or, the descent of Persephone Graves.





	pomegranates

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Torture. No sexual abuse as such, but Percy is aware that Grindelwald is probably doing things with her body and her face, and feels disgusted by it.

Ottilia Graves was dead, to begin with. She had died when her daughter Persephone was in her third year at Ilvermorny, and, even when Persephone returned home to the house in the Catskills, her ghost had not come to comfort her grieving, now-orphaned daughter.

She was dead, she had moved on, and it was not until December 1926, held captive by Gellert Grindelwald, that her daughter saw her again, standing behind Grindelwald-in-Persephone's right shoulder, eyebrows raised in an expression of bored incredulity.

Grindelwald did not appear to notice her. Persephone deduced from that that she was either on the verge of death, or the verge of madness-- either could be a result of prolonged Cruciatus, and that, either way, her problems as she knew them would very soon be over.

“We have a visitor,” Grindelwald remarked, his eyes raking over Persephone's form with an avidity she hoped had never been her own. “An _English_ visitor. Do tell me, Madame Graves, should I be concerned?

Persephone eyed him, running through the English wizards she knew well-- there was Phemy, of course, and Phemy's husband Fleamont, and--

“ _Scamander_ ,” he snarled, face suddenly very close to hers, and Persephone could barely keep the triumph hidden, because Theseus would know, Theseus would surely realise, however good Grindelwald was, she and Theseus once spent three days in a foxhole hiding from Inferi, not daring to use magic in case it gave away their position.

Theseus Scamander had picked lice from her hair, and stood up as witness in her cousin's wedding, and they had both bled on the other, copiously, stitched wounds where it would have been a waste to use magic and slept together in a heap of exhaustion.

Grindelwald stopped, then, and reached out to touch her chin, the tender touch Persephone used only very rarely-- she wasn't a tender woman, but she's a _Graves_ , so no one expects it, really-- and said, very kindly, “Oh no, my dear, oh no. Not Theseus Scamander. His little brother. Newton.”

Persephone had heard a great deal about Newt Scamander. Given that she kept all of Theseus's letters, and Grindelwald was distressingly thorough at research, so has Grindelwald. Somewhere in those sprawling scrolls, there wass always a set of paragraphs beginning, _And you'll never guess what Newt's done this time, Percy, really, you won't---_ and invariably Persephone never did, though she didn't try all that hard.

She'd never met Newt Scamander, not to remember. She might have met him at the party they held after the No-Majs declared Armistice, but Fleamont and Euphemia were mixing the drinks, casting complex charms which heightened the liquor content, and anyway Persephone had ended up falling in to bed with a Dragon Tamer whose name she never did catch.

She wasn't not, really, any more fucked than she was when Grindelwald left this morning, having healed her wrists and ankles just to re-break them, and given her a touch of _Crucio_ just to add spice, but she still felt sick with it

“Tell me,” he breathed, “How do you think Theseus Scamander will feel about you, when you kill his baby brother?”

The thought of that-- of killing Newt, who didn't need to be killed, surely, not Theseus's head-in-the-clouds little brother-- hit her like Grindelwald's boot in her stomach, but it barely had time to register before the Cruciatus started again.

When she came back to herself, again, Grindelwald had gone. She'd soiled herself, but the humiliation of that had almost died, after so long. All that was left was regret that her courses had stopped, and she couldn't try and disconcert him by bleeding all over the place. Every night he left her to lie in her own filth, and every morning he cast Evanesco before he started it all over again, and that was all Persephone had to keep track of the days. She'd long lost track of time and tide and the lunar cycle, all the things she would once have said she would always, always know.

Her mother was still there, looking as she had the last time she'd waved Persephone off to Ilvermorny, in a long gown with her hair in a psyche knot.

Persephone hadn't seen her, after. No one had let her. Her aunt had decreed that the coffin should be closed, and so it had been. She had been left to nurture wisps of rumour, sentences that finished abruptly when she walked into a room. 

Ottilia Graves had been a senior Auror, one of the finest, and had died nobly. Persephone supposed that her mother, standing there, was probably extremely disappointed in her, the last of the descendents of Gondolphus Graves-- at least, the last with the name, both Ottilia and her sister Ardelia having been the mothers of only children, and Euphemia being married.

Maybe Euphemia would follow her husband's family tradition, after Persephone died, and there would be a little Graves Potter running around one day.

The feeling of being slapped by a ghost was not one that Persephone would recommend. Her mother leaned down over her, dark eyes burning in her translucent face, horrified at the prospect of her daughter just lying there and giving up, as if Persephone hadn't fought, and fought, until she ran out of strength, and the will, just waiting for Grindelwald to go that bit too far, or for herself to stop being useful-- and she would, once Grindelwald's plan came to fruition, that plan that involved the No-Maj boy Credence.

He'd been so curious about Credence--

The ghostly hand slapped her again. It felt like being plunged face first into a snow drift, stuck there until she burned with the cold.

She couldn't think about Credence. She couldn't think about anything that mattered, not really, and there was enough to annoy Grindelwald with in the things that didn't matter. 

Her mother was still there, cold and furious and comforting. The pain in her wrists and ankles had dulled to an ache, almost bearable, with time and the Cruciatus to remind her of what real pain felt like, and her ribs had nearly healed, though not right.

Persephone slept. For all she knew, she'd sleep forever, as if she were in the Death Chamber, holding tight to memories of bright summer, of the cool of the snow in the mountains, of Euphemia's face when Fleamont Potter had slid a ring onto her finger in beseiged Paris. 

When she woke, Grindelwald wasn't there. Nor when she woke for a second time, lying in layers of her own filth, her trousers clinging to her skin, and harsh pain when she moved. 

Her mother drifted around the cell, silent and disdainful, and Persephone closed her eyes, and prayed, the way her No-Maj-born father had taught her, when she was still small enough that what she said could be dismissed as the burblings of an imaginative child, before he'd died himself.

Her wrists were swollen, grotesque around the manacles, and Persephone breathed in, breathed out, and wondered if Grindelwald now proposed to starve her to death, to see for how long her magic could fight an infection. Her ankles were probably just as bad, beneath her trouser cuffs, and _where, o death, is your victory? Where, o death, is your sting?_ , and please, please let this mean that Grindelwald was defeated, that he no longer inhabited her body, used it for his own purposes. 

_I find it quite intriguing_ , he'd told her, very early, brushing a lock of hair behind his own ear, and arching his back. _How sensitive women are. If I'd known-- but, ah well_ , and the nausea hadn't been abated by knowing he hadn't laid a finger on her body, only on the flesh he was using. It had felt like oily smears left across her skin. 

Perhaps he was dead. Perhaps he had died in her body, and they were sending Persephone Graves the traitor to the Potters Field, and oh, Sera, oh, Sera, Persephone would never have betrayed her, but in the end, as long as Grindelwald was dead, it didn't matter.

Perhaps the Scamander boy had saved them after all. Perhaps Grindelwald had never found the Obscurus he so desperately desired, his plans around poor Credence never coming to fruition.

Her throat hurt. There was no water in the cell, and no food either, but the water would kill her faster. She'd become dehydrated, once, in '11, chasing smugglers through the deserts of Arizona before they could scupper Arizona joining the Union and break Rappaport's Law with it, and the long long lectures that had come after had reminded her how easy it was for dehydration to kill.

It might not be so bad to die here, with the memory of her mother's face-- or her mother's ghost, or whatever this was, beside her, to float away on a haze of fever while her brains baked in her skull, or some small vein, overstressed by Crucio, gave way and burst and killed her.

It would be an end.

Her mother's slap-- another, again, and she wasn't sure what that meant, when Ottilia had never touched her in violence when alive-- didn't wake her so well, that time.

It would end. Please, oh please, let it _end_.


End file.
